Though I can guarantee that there won’t be a plot synopsis of this episode over at Polite Dissent this week, there is still a remote chance of Scott eventually getting caught up on Fringe and posting. The odds are definitely better than the odds of winning the lottery, getting hit by lightning, or being bitten by a shark.

Revisiting the Road Not Taken

The Observers’ LQ7 unit for extracting audio from the glass in Nina’s office was very reminiscent of Peter’s electron microscope/Geiger counter/mp3 player used to extract audio from a partially melted window in Episode 19 of Season 1, The Road Not Taken. (You can read my notes on that in the comments section of Scott’s post on that episode) It’s really no more plausible now than it was is season one. At least in The Road Not Taken, the window was partially melted to provide a malleable medium to encode the audio waves on, while no such condition existed in Nina’s office. On the other hand, the writers might claim some sort of temporal echoes were encoded in the glass .

Sit Ubu, Sit…

The Ministry of Science unofficially maintains a black lab for work against The Observers. I hope it’s house trained. Oh, wait, Nina meant a black projects laboratory. Never Mind. 🙂

Com One, Com All…

Apparently, although the Observers do not actively monitor or log com activity, they can track down a specific com if they need to.

The Loyalist mentioned not being able to locate Nina’s com (due to the fact that she was deep underground in the black lab), which would imply that they have the ability to track a specific com even if it’s in stand-by/ not on a call, but for some reason they couldn’t determine her approximate location by determining where she was when her com last had signal.

Also, why don’t the Observers monitor and log all communications on the air waves to detect subversive activity? (Similar to The Machine in the show Person of Interest) Surely they have the technical capability to do that in real time.

Additionally, either the Observers are just plain stupid, or they would seem to have no way of determining what com device called Nina’s com, otherwise, Olivia’s device would now be compromised. Do they not have a Patriot Act in 2036?

What Happen to All the Wanted Notices?

Once again, our heroic trio walks around freely, in broad daylight, in public areas without detection.

Whimsical Windmark

How exactly does an Observer determine when to phase shift and when to use the elevator? Last week, when the elevator was out, Windmark took the stairs. This week, when the elevator was working, he phase shifts.

It’s a Good Thing The Observers Are More Incompetent than the Fringe Team Is.

Our heroic trio knows the lab has been compromised, but they return there anyway. How did they know that there wasn’t still a team of Observers and Loyalists there investigating the lab or waiting in ambush for them? How did they know the Observers didn’t leave a bomb behind as a trap? How did they know the lab wasn’t being staked out? How did they know the Observers didn’t tie into the security cameras to watch the lab?

And by the way, why didn’t The Observers do any of those things? At the very least, they should have torn that lab apart, not only to look for the boy, but to learn as much about what The Resistance had been doing there. It’s absurd to think they didn’t even do a halfway serious search for the boy.

A Bit More Satisfying of a Character End

At least we got to see Nina go out with her hero’s death, unlike the death of another great character, Sam Weiss. We got to see her go, and we got to feel the loss. I know Sam Weiss technically wasn’t a major character and was only in a few episodes, but he was a really interesting character, and he deserved a more interesting end.

Turn Back Time

If you watched the preview for the final three episodes, you may be wondering the same thing I am: Are they going to reset time and make the events of season five (or even the whole series) never have happened, or was that mention just put in there to make us think that’s what is going to happen?

brossaid

With regards to the phase shift, it appeared as if Windmark had to look down (To see where the elevator led, similar to how Peter saw where the door was hidden) before he could phase shift into the lab, and the others followed.